


boundless and bare

by nocturnalboys



Category: The Poppy War - R. F. Kuang
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Character Study, M/M, Purple Prose, post TPW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-18
Updated: 2020-10-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:02:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 982
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27088312
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nocturnalboys/pseuds/nocturnalboys
Summary: Just a lot of thoughts I had about Altan and Chaghan's relationship, helpfully put into second person for... basically no reason :)
Relationships: Chaghan Suren/Altan Trengsin
Comments: 5
Kudos: 23





	boundless and bare

You can’t recall a time when you could just look away from him and be done with it. Call it what you will, fatalism, masochism, desperation. After that first fight it wasn’t about power anymore, not in the traditional sense. It was about that black hole, the exploding sun within him that made it so hard to move away. You just didn’t want to. So many people could stake a claim on him and act as if their words would stick. To them he was broken, unbroken, bright or destructive, pathetic or simply useful.

Not that you’ve ever steered totally clear of giving him a label yourself. But to you, he was alive, present and inevitable, the source that ran to the sea. Altan Trengsin.

***

Altan was a choice you made every day. With Qara, you never got a choice. From the day you were born she was always there, indelible. With Altan, you married yourself to fate every moment you chose to follow him. If there was a day you could have picked to walk away from it all, well… you would rather have risked going up like brittle grass in his light than lose it.

***

It’s hard to say if you ever really had it in yourself to hurt him. At first there was a sense of injustice, that Altan would presume to take your place. Yet when it came to blows all you wanted, a desperate squirming insect feeling in your gut, was for him to burn you into a husk. And you wanted it to hurt.

Pain and need are too close, because both of them make you helpless. In the winding labyrinth of the earth, all ice and eidolon shadow, even a threat sounds like desire. What began as envy burns and roils inside you. You wanted him to hold you, to be sure and visceral where others would make their own judgements about your _fragile_ body, and you wanted Altan to consume you until only marrow-limned bones were left, only bones that would pierce through and impale him just as brutally.

When all was said and done, you _wanted_.

***

He never hurt you like that, not quite like that, not in the raw way that animals do but like a man. And before that, he didn’t hurt you either. When there was war, brutality and opium, Altan did what he could to keep from caving in, and that frustrated you. A metal screw turning in your jaw, tighter and tighter, watching him ossify. Even then he didn’t destroy you in the way you hoped and feared and wished he might.

You were both from the outside, oddities, bizarre children even when you stopped being children. So in those moments when he held you, it wasn’t violent at all. You had seen enough of that already. He only ever burned you with the warmth of his skin, his long beautifully dark fingers playing the instrument of your body until you almost couldn’t remember what it felt like to be cold.

Every day, Altan Trengsin had to find a new way to hold himself together. If you could be anything to him the way he was to you, then it would all be worth it.

***

The dam breaking? It’s nothing and everything in your memory. Nothing compared to your fear and hope, held back barely in your heart by strings of muscle. Anything you could be to him… well, all this water won’t stop him from lighting you up in tongues of flame when it’s all washed out and flooded.

***

Fang Runin. Of all the people around you and Altan, she understood the least. You have walked in her very thoughts, and seen that she cannot comprehend the ties that bind you and he. She sees the animosity, the bite that rises only from your desperation, _whatever you can be to him_ , anything to keep him from burning out.

She doesn’t see the way you want to tumble headlong into him, doesn’t know the way he holds you knowing he can’t break you, the way _whole_ and _broken_ as a binary no longer makes sense when he clings to you, utterly helpless and utterly in control. You know that she has her own hopes for him, just as everyone does, and you feel for that. The way they move together is beautiful, surely.

Still, Rin is unaware of Altan as _Altan_ , not just a face that belies an ideal. She is still unaware of so many things.

***

Near the end you wish you pleaded with him more, forced his hand, fought with him. Not to make the choices that he spiralled into, despite his dream. You could have let him eat you alive before he betrayed himself the way he did, but you got soft. It was the end and despite everything you were so tired of holding him back when all you wanted was to hold him down.

It will always tear you apart that way. Knowing maybe in another world, another life, he could have laid down his arms and come away from it. If you could have ruined every hand that ever forced him, even your own, you would have done it in a heartbeat.

***

Sometimes you still find pieces of him, not physically, just shards of memory and energy like broken glass that slice into you even as you try to hold them closer.

Oh, you do anyway. You have always wanted him to hurt you, and now he is.

***

In another time, what would you have done? The world is so big, and you easily could lose yourselves together. Leave all the experiments behind, let nothing stand as a reminder. The tides of history should never have been his burden to shoulder.

What could you have been? Or… maybe it doesn’t matter, the regret or the dream. You would have loved him anyway.


End file.
